Imitation, we’re assured, is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also very often the most convenient. Occasionally though, borrowing one man’s identity to promote another is more than just a handy tribute; it’s the only way in which to confirm their parity. Tubby Hayes, of course, shared his familiar, subtly-layered nickname of The Little Giant with another pint-sized tenor saxophone athlete, the Chicago-born Johnny Griffin, although, several thousand miles and one enormous gulf in musical culture apart, each man’s handle was appended independently. Apparently the American wasn’t altogether happy when he discovered the coincidence, reminding Hayes with unrestrained passion that it was he who was the real deal (‘and don’t you forget it, fatso’). A quarter century or so after his death, Hayes’ name got tagged with another title belonging to an even more imposing saxophonic legend. Introducing a BBC radio ‘Jazz Profiles’ broadcast celebrating his legacy in 2001, pianist/presenter Julian Joseph reached for the closest, and perhaps most loaded with implication, strap-line of all, calling Hayes ‘Britain’s Saxophone Colossus.’
Nobody really needs to be told to whom the Colossus title really belongs. Ever since publicist Bob Altshuler coined it as the name for a soon-to-be-issued Prestige LP in 1956 (a decision possibly elevating the album to heights of visibility it might not have reached under a less sensational billing), it had belonged to one man; Sonny Rollins, a player who possessed both the physique and the musical gravitas to make the moniker stick.
Rollins’ recent death has reminded us of just how enormous was his presence; bestriding the international jazz stage for over seventy-five years, he’ll doubtless still be casting an impossible to ignore shadow for years to come, until jazz finally frees itself from the seductive lure of its own tradition. But jazz giants come in all shapes and sizes, with some colossi cut down long before they’ve had the time to establish permanence. Tubby Hayes was one such, and given how close he and Rollins were in age, creative ambition and, on a few remarkable instances, physical proximity, I thought it might be illuminative to take a closer look at the relationship they enjoyed, one which passed variously through phases of hero worship, influence, mutual respect, bewilderment and rejection and, finally, collaboration-by-proxy.
In the sleeve note to the Jazz Couriers debut LP issued in 1958, Tubby Hayes remembers that he ‘first heard Rollins on those things with Bud Powell and Fats Navarro (‘Bouncing with Bud’ etc.)’, a reference of course to the 1949 quintet session Powell had led for Blue Note Records, indisputably his finest hour in a horn-led setting and which, with its potent trumpet and tenor frontline, is now regarded as a prototype of the Hard Bop movement to come. Hayes wouldn’t have heard these on an original Blue Note issue though, rather most likely on a domestic equivalent released by Vogue Records, who up until the mid-1950s retained a local license for the US label’s product. The interest here though isn’t in industry tie-ins, as diverting as they may be to some; it’s in the fact that at a time when Stan Getz’s more opaque and frosted style was holding sway over most younger jazz tenorists (including Hayes’ local idol Ronnie Scott), and everyone sounded, according to Hayes, like they ‘were playing a drainpipe’, the teenage tyro from London SW15 was tuned into something far more assertive.
Although source material remained hard to come by (Rollins’ discs on the Prestige label, to which he’d signed in 1951, appeared only sporadically in Britain under license to Esquire and then often with a significant time lag), Hayes interest in his American idol only increased. Always an uncanny mimic, he was soon reflecting this influence in his own playing, as the hipper end of the UK’s jazz press picked up on. Writing in the sleeve note of one of the Englishman’s first EP releases as a leader, Alun Morgan noted how the headliner’s tenor playing ‘belongs to the amalgamated Sonny Rollins-Sonny Stitt “hard-blowing” school’, not really a school at all given how individual both Sonnys were by this point. The inference though was clear; this wasn’t any of that ‘Brothers’ business; this was bop, and hard at that; a tenor-made extension of the full-on, impassioned delivery of Charlie Parker, the man who Hayes would maintain was his base-line inspiration.
The shock of such extroversion was doubled when encountered live. Reviewing the opening night by Hayes own touring combo in April 1955 - a mid-sized outfit balancing dance band edicts with as much out and out jazz as it could get away with - ‘Record Mirror’s Tony Hall called Hayes ‘quite the most uncommercial tenor man in Britain. Certainly the most coloured [sic.] sounding. Very Sonny Rollins-ish, in fact.’ Supporting this assertion Hall noted that for his quartet band-within-a-band feature Hayes had chosen ‘the Sonny Rollins line on ‘[The] Way You Look Tonight’’.
This may seem like an expected nod, one modern tenor to another, yet when one examines the time-line involved, one appreciates just how cutting-edge such a choice then was. Rollins had recorded this piece (a paraphrase of Jerome Kern’s melody which some issues called ‘The Way You Blow Tonight’, such was its fresh-minted melodicism) in October 1954, barely six months earlier, meaning that Hayes had to have learned it from an imported copy of the original Prestige 10” LP (PRLP 190), most likely brought back to London by a colleague from ‘Geraldo’s Navy’, the street term for those musicians then working the transatlantic liner passages to New York and back. The UK release of this album had to wait until well into 1955. Ironically, when it did appear ‘Musical Express’’s Mike Butcher reviewed one of Hayes’ 78rpm’s alongside it, beginning his appraisal by stating that ‘Tubs blows his tenor freely, convincingly, in the Rollins’ idiom but without any dubious attempt at slavish imitation.’
This was a spot-on assessment of the Hayes/Rollins axis at this point. It was also an unusually prescient summary of perhaps Hayes greatest gift; that of being able to synthesise new jazz trends to his own ends. By the time of the formation of the Jazz Couriers some two years later, both Hayes and his co-leader Ronnie Scott were firmly under Rollins’ spell, each naming the New Yorker among their key influences. On the surface, Hayes appeared closer to the original model – with power and fluency to match – although in spirit at least it was Scott’s quirkier, less predictable phrase shapes that seemed to best echo their joint inspiration.
Yet it was Hayes who was entering a purple patch, one which was to see him reaching beyond the usual restrictive parochial practices toward international standard-virtuosity. When the Couriers folded in late 1959, and Hayes went out on his own with a new quartet, he finally appeared ready to play his idols – Getz, Johnny Griffin, Hank Mobley, John Coltrane and, significantly, Sonny Rollins – at their own game.
‘I doubt very much whether even Stan Getz or Rollins or Stitt could have cut him technically,’ wrote Tony Hall of the quartet’s debut at Soho’s Flamingo club that autumn. Hall concentrated on the obvious surface technicalities; others picked up on something altogether more important. On a chance hearing of Hayes new LP ‘Tubby’s Groove’ the following year, ‘Melody Maker’s Bob Dawbarn mistook it for a Rollins record. Superficially, this seemed to hint at simple plagiarism; what it actually revealed was Hayes’ own world-class ability. ‘He sounds like Sonny’s alter-ego,’ wrote one journalist of the album years later. ‘His tone is big, rich and beautiful, and his ideas tumble out in cascades of blues-saturated glissandi and phrases that pulsate and expand with formidable logic.’
Yet, as the 1960s moved on there were others who were to make the same schoolboy error of thinking Hayes a mere copycat, among them none other than Stan Getz, who on his 1964 visit to London to play Ronnie Scott’s club, also appeared on ITV’s ‘The Braden Beat’ whereupon his host Bernard Braden played a televised version of the patented ‘Blindfold Test’, originally featured in the US jazz bible ‘DownBeat’, during which the participant was asked to guess the identity of the records being played. Getz thought Hayes was Sonny Rollins. Braden was delighted to catch him out, and yet again British jazz stood that much taller through Hayes’ example. (It has to be said, Getz somewhat got his own back when played another Hayes’ track in a ‘DownBeat’ test proper that same year, dismissing it as too monotonous).
By this juncture Hayes had actually met Rollins, while on his pioneering guest soloist’s trip to New York in September 1961. The American saxophonist had infamously spent the last two years in seclusion, attempting to redesign his own playing after feeling the weight of critical expectation bearing down upon him. Testing the waters low-key style as an audience member at various clubs, Rollins had told Hayes he’d heard his version of the Kern/Hammerstein song ‘The Folks Who Live On The Hill’, included on the Englishman’s new LP ‘Tubbs’, and that consequently he wanted to include the piece in the repertoire of his new group. ‘This was one of my key experiences,’ Hayes told the press soon after.
Tellingly, Rollins had singled out a recording on which Hayes played vibraphone rather than tenor. Was this a compliment or was Rollins avoiding the awkward fact that the same album contained a version of ‘Wonderful, Wonderful’ unimaginable without his own, taped four years earlier?
To Hayes, it was endorsement enough, and as if returning the favour, on the LP he taped while in the Big Apple (‘Tubbs in N.Y.’) he tackled two Rollins’ compositions, ‘Doxy’ and ‘Airegin’. Their inclusion would have been an empty gesture had the results not been so unlike those of the originals. No-one could now truly mistake Hayes for anybody else, surely?
As if breaking some sort of spell, Hayes’ meeting Rollins ended his tendency to automatic obeisance. In 1963, interviewed in ‘Jazz News and Review’, he queried the American’s post-comeback dalliance with tonal distortion on ‘that rather weird bossa nova album’ (‘What’s New?) and openly declared ‘I really don’t know what he was doing’ on the then new ‘Our Man In Jazz’ LP, made in the company of the puckish trumpeter Don Cherry, an associate of the avant-garde altoist Ornette Coleman. ‘Now I know Sonny Rollins,’ Hayes said, ‘I know what kind of guy he is and I think I know what he wants to play, and this is him not being himself.’
Ambiguity now replaced outright understanding. That same year, when appearing on the popular ‘Hear Me Talking’ jazz slot on BBC radio, he contrasted his hopes for Rollins to his utter mystification at John Coltrane’s ‘two chords’ stagnation (it would be some time before Hayes got a handle on the modal revolution). ‘If Sonny can keep what he wants going together, he will lead the way,’ he opined, although choosing as an illustrative example a 1954 recording of Rollins – ‘I Want To Be Happy’, from the same session as ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ - added a hollowness to his assertion that his subject ‘is playing better than ever’.
Ambiguity gave way to acceptance in January 1965 when Rollins made his English debut at Ronnie Scott’s club, sharing the bill (and sometimes a rhythm section) with the Hayes quartet. It was to be a testing time; the music itself actually presented little that an open ear couldn’t latch on to – Ronnie Scott described his guest’s performances as a condensed and personalised history of jazz saxophone, ‘The Observer’s Benny Green as a ‘vast rubbish dump sprinkled with pearls’ – but Rollins’ eccentric behaviour both on an off-stage was bewildering. On some nights he’d play with a row of tambourines attached to his belt, on others he’d begin and end tunes so abruptly that it periodically made his accompanying trio look inept. Sometimes he’d blow with astonishing fluency; at other moments, he’d take the saxophone out of his mouth after a few bars and examine it as if it were wholly unknown to him. This spectacle was such that beneath a rather alarmist-sounding headline ‘The verdict on Sonny Rollins’, several of London’s top jazzmen – including Hayes, Dick Morrissey, Harry Klein, Keith Christie and pianist Stan Tracey, who was working with the American - were asked their opinion.
The consensus was that Rollins was doing great things, albeit in a rather oblique way. ‘Most things he does makes sense,’ Hayes believed. ‘Some people say he’s far out, but I think he’s straight down the line,’ he added. ‘[B]ut a very advanced straight down the line.’
Later that same year Rollins returned to London to work on the soundtrack of the Lewis Gilbert-directed Michael Caine film ‘Alfie’, recruiting a band of local players to attempt to transfer his quixotic ideas to screen. Rumour has long had it that Tubby Hayes was among them, a falsehood perpetuated by many, once mistakenly by this writer (there were clues hidden in plain sight all the while; Derek Jewell’s insightful interview with Rollins from the time of the ‘Alfie’ session, included in ‘The Popular Voice’, clearly mentions six British musicians taking part, with Ronnie Scott the only tenor). There even exists the suggestion that it was Hayes imitating Rollins in the released film’s musical interjections; such a suggestion is nonsense – Tubby Hayes would’ve known the foolishness at any such attempt. He was, however, present at the film’s London premiere in March 1966, performing a surreal never-ending interpretation of the jaunty main theme while the cinema’s projectionists fought a technical problem. Among those witnessing this spectacle were all four Beatles, Michael Caine and Rollins himself. Their reactions went unrecorded.
Hayes’ new quartet made its debut that same month, opposite Rollins, on the newly opened Ronnie Scott premises in Frith Street. A bigger room seemed only to exaggerate the visitor’s appetite for expansive exploration. One song might now stretch across not one but two sets. For Hayes, arguably the biggest local offender as far as extended solos went, whose similar efforts had often met the reproach of Scott himself, there appeared to be a game of double standards afoot. ‘I’ve heard...Sonny...stretching right out – and nobody says anything about that,’ he protested in the pages of ‘Crescendo’. Such profligacy was also the source of a good gag. ‘I got to Ronnie’s about three this morning,’ Hayes would tell his audiences, ‘just in time to hear the end of Sonny’s opening number.’
Where it mattered most though, there was still respect. Hayes played a Rollins track on his return to the BBC’s ‘Hear Me Talking’ in August 1966, and his latest LP, the big band extravaganza ‘100% Proof’, originally conceived as tribute to his key musical influences, included a version of ‘Sonnymoon For Two’, Rollins’ eternal blues anthem, fittingly rejigged as twin tenor feature for Ronnie Scott and himself.
There were still those who thought Hayes a tad too close to Rollins for comfort (as late as the early 1970s one survey of jazz noted how ‘[Rollins] music, an acquired taste, was much imitated for a while, for instance by the British tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes’), and even as he drew ever closer to the caprices of the avant-garde, such as on his landmark album ‘Mexican Green’ (1967) there appeared an inevitable air of comparison. Some of these were slight; ‘he nods towards Rollins’ reported one reviewer, another noting ‘Rollins-like drainpipe tonalities’, itself an interesting hijacking of the imagery Hayes had once used to describe the Getz school of tenor.
What Rollins did give Hayes in the late 1960s, as free jazz, the emergence of fusion, and the wake of John Coltrane caused destabilising waves of influence, was an anchor in melody. Drummer Spike Wells, who joined the Hayes quartet in 1968, remembers his leader recoiling somewhat from an earlier Coltrane-fixated phase into something more linear, drawing very much on the Rollins model circa. 1962.
Not that this was in any way a technical or artistic cop-out. There exists a radio recording of this particular Hayes band playing a version of Rollins’ ‘Oleo’ that is as demanding, both physically and musically, as can be imagined. Close to two decades since Hayes had first heard Rollins they’d finally arrived at the same place; both were now heavyweight tenors happy to be themselves. And although Rollins would close out the Sixties once more in retirement, gone were the days of agonised redefinition. If both men had found a lasting identity, the question remained; where now to place it?
When Rollins at last re-emerged on record in 1972 with the decidedly contemporary sounding ‘Next Album’ (Milestone), he found a willing listener in Tubby Hayes. ‘I’m interested in the rhythmic trends and the use of electronic instruments and effects,’ the English saxophonist told Max Jones of ‘Melody Maker’ that year. ‘I feel if you incorporate what you want of the present-day sounds you can still have...your solo playing as you want [it].’ It might have been Rollins talking, defending his use of electric piano and bass guitar, and the rock underpinnings of tracks like ‘Playin’ In The Yard’. The two men could still share repertoire too; there exists a bootleg tape of one of Hayes final guest appearances from early 1973 on which he not only plays ‘Sonnymoon for Two’, but also ‘Poinciana’, a song Rollins had resuscitated on ‘Next Album’. He also gamely strings together a dozen or so standards, ranging from Vernon Duke to Burt Bacharach, leading his rhythm section a merry dance in the manner he’d learned from Rollins way back on those epic nights in Gerrard Street.
And even right at the end, as he lay awaiting the final surgery that failed to save him, Tubby Hayes was still listening to his old idol, his contemporary, his shaping influence, his enigmatic friend. Revealingly, cassette tapes he took into hospital with him contain excerpts from ‘Next Album’, alongside recordings by Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw and Quincy Jones.
Like Sonny Rollins, Tubby Hayes was a man not much given to nostalgia. Here and now, the improviser’s favoured space, was his turf, and for much of his professional life he’d been all too happy to share it with another giant; twin tenors then, casting the most impressive of shadows; big personalities leaving us so much of themselves to marvel at forever-more.